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Asteroid target selection for the new Rosetta mission baseline. 21 Lutetia and 2867 Steins

Barbieri, C.; Barucci, M. A.; Fornasier, S. +8 more

The new Rosetta mission baseline to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko includes two asteroid fly-bys. To help in target selection we studied all the candidates of all the possible scenarios. Observations have been carried out at ESO-NTT (La Silla, Chile), TNG (Canaries), and NASA-IRTF (Hawaii) telescopes, in order to determine the taxonomy of all…

Thermal evolution model of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the new Rosetta target

Coradini, A.; Capria, M. T.; de Sanctis, M. C.

Rosetta, the ESA mission dedicated to the detailed study of a comet nucleus before and after the onset of activity, will arrive at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. At the moment, little is known about this comet, but the successful design of the ROSETTA mission requires some preliminary knowledge of the comet physical parameters. These qua…

The Jacobi constant for a cometary orbiter

Mysen, E.; Aksnes, K.

The Jacobi constant of a probe under the gravitational attraction of a rotating irregular body is rederived for excited, but free rigid rotation of the central mass. A related Tisserand-like quantity is found to be sufficiently conserved for it to qualify as a pseudo-integral. The quantity's near constancy is shown to imply that certain regions in…

Orbit correction without variational equations. The orbits of Caliban, 46P/Wirtanen and 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Aksnes, K.; Grav, T.

Differential orbit correction is performed by computing an osculating orbit from observations from which the perturbations have been subtracted. No variational equations need to be integrated except to solve for non-gravitational forces. The perturbations in the observations are obtained by subtracting a two-body orbit from an integrated, perturbe…